Tribal court rules against hog farm

April 15, 2008

SIOUX FALLS - The owner of a hog farm planned for land west of Wagner says he just wants to talk with Yankton Sioux tribal officials who have gone to court to block access to the site. ''We just want to sit down and talk with the folks,'' Arlan Moss of Hull, Iowa, said of tribal officials. A judge in the Yankton Sioux Tribal Court on Monday granted the tribe's petition for the exclusion and removal of the hog farm developers, said tribal attorney Charles Abourezk of Rapid City. According to Abourezk, the ruling basically prohibits them from traveling across Yankton Sioux Reservation land to get to the site, which he said is surrounded by tribal land. ''To be able to get to their deeded land, they would have to cross the Yankton Sioux Reservation to get there, so they're now prohibited from being on reservation land, and that can be enforced by tribal law enforcement,'' Abourezk said. The site is right on the road that leads to Marty, headquarters of the Yankton Sioux Tribe. Moss said he's not sure what happens next. ''We're disappointed that this would come up at this time, because we have not been trying to hide this project.'' The land in the area is a checkerboard of private, tribal and deeded land, but state, county and tribal law enforcement know which is which, Abourezk said. Late last week, Moss said construction at the Long View Farm site had been postponed in light of the tribe's concerns. Protesters dropped plans to barricade a road leading to the work site and said they would stage a protest Monday. According to Moss, South Dakota state environmental officials had confirmed that his plans complied with all the regulatory requirements for the sow farm, which could house an average of 3,350 sows and produce 70,000 pigs a year. ''We've received assurances from county and state officials that what we're doing is right,'' he said Monday. Moss said his family raises crops and livestock in the Hull area and needed an isolation unit for sows to farrow their pigs, which would be shipped back to Iowa after they're a couple weeks old. ''We started working on this down there last summer, and we knew there were some people opposed to it, but we had people who were very in favor of it. We tried to answer everybody's questions.'' Moss said the sow farm would create 13 full-time jobs and would be good for the area's economy. ''If we thought we were an environmental hazard, we wouldn't be there. We're very conscious of that,'' Moss said. Abourezk said Moss can seek a hearing to get the order reconsidered but that he doesn't think it would go to U.S. District Court. ''As a matter of federal Indian law, the power of a tribe to exclude people from its reservation has been absolutely upheld at all levels of the federal courts,'' he said. ''That's one of the inherent powers of tribes that has never been taken away, the power to exclude.'' Patrice Kunesh, an assistant law professor at the University of South Dakota, said it sounds like the situation has similarities to some important American Indian jurisdiction cases that have been decided in the federal court system. She said tribes can't regulate the conduct of non-Indians on non-Indian land but that there are important exceptions. She also said tribes generally have exclusive jurisdiction on internal tribal matters.